Jakob Nielsen has written an informative entry to Alertbox this week titled, Reviving Advanced Hypertext, the column comments on some of the new features on the web today, including explicit structures, user-constructed structures (post-its), integrated browsing, searching & highlighting, overview maps (sitemaps, etc.) and physical hypertext (metaphors, real-world actions).
Pinhole Photography by Thomas Hudson Reeve
Thomas Hudson Reeve an artist and photographer from the US, has opened his photographic gallery showing photos of New York City from 2001.
The most interesting aspect of his gallery is that every photo has been taken from handmade pinhole paper cameras. How Cool!
Beating spam with Movable Type
The folks over at Six Apart have written a useful article on the whole issue of spam and how to beat it, it’s quite informative if you are new to the subject.
Jay Allen has also written an interesting article on getting the most out of MT-Blacklist, a plugin used to combat spam with Movable Type.
Assumed knowledge & the next big challenge: learning French
Being new to the UK and also the european community, I am finding that my short stay here so far, has introduced both a huge list of immediate challenges, such as assumed (if not presumed) knowledge of the most basic things, as well as some longer challenges (and goals)…
To give you an example, the other week, I found that the emergency numbers here in the UK are different from those of Australia. Emergency is “999” in the UK. Who would of thought???! In Australia, emergency is assumed as “000” for land lines and to perhaps a few, “112” for mobiles.
Is that an iPod in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Happy New year, and welcome to the first post of 2005.
I’m really excited to be back online and looking forward to a really great and exciting year head here in the UK.
After being away from email, computers, all my friends and family back home (during the Xmas and the New Year festive breaks), my stay in London has started simply great, with my introduction to the world of portable music with a small, if not tiny mini baby. :)
Merry Christmas & New Year’s Wish
I wanted to wish everyone out there… readers, returning visitors, people visiting for the first time, friends both at home in Sydney, and also here in the UK …a very Merry Xmas and a safe New Years!
Take care and see you all in 2005 :-)
D-Lib Magazine on digital library research
D-Lib Magazine is a publication focused on digital library research and development, including but not limited to new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues. The magazine is published monthly and its full contents, including all back issues, are available free of charge at the D-Lib web site and mirror sites around the world.
UK UPA london event: Games and the EyeToy
The UK Chapter of the UPA, the Usability Professionals’ Association who promote usability concepts and techniques in the UK, will be holding an event tomorrow night at Microsoft London on employed User Centred Design (UCD) techniques in game design by Amberlight Partners from their work with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.
I’m really looking forward to attending tomorrow night’s event, so see you there! :)
The McKinsey view on What is Next in Mobile Telecom
McKinsey & Co. have written some very informative and useful articles on how to keep mobile subscribers loyal.
The proven adoption of an approach known as Customer Lifetime Management (CLM) by several leading financial-services players over the years, is the key to maintaining loyalty, trust and customer retention. * You will need to be subscribed to read the articles, but some are free.
CLM involves capturing and analyzing data about customers for the purpose of marketing to and serving them on the basis of the value they are expected to create during their “lifetime” with the company. Leading practitioners annually develop and test thousands of new offers targeted at narrowly defined customer segments and rapidly scale up only the most successful ones.
UXnet meet in London
It was a pleasure attending the first UXnet meet in London last night which featured a talk by Kevin Cheng of OK/Cancel. It was a fantastic turn out, and was great to meet with so many like minded individuals, at UCLIC and later at the pub and dinner.
It was great to meet up with James Robertson, also from Sydney, Nico Macdonald, Kevin Cheng, Lou Rosenfeld and many thanks to Joshua Kaufman and all those involved in organising the event.
The Dark Side of Hyde Park
I had the most amazing experience last night with Bec, Meg, Johnny, Giri and Julie when we visited the new Sydney restaurant called The Darkside of Hyde Park.
It is the 2nd restaurant of this type to open in Australia, joining London, Zurich and New York where you eat in complete darkness.
It is an experience you will never forget! Here is a review by the Melbourne Age. I will return to this post and comment on the amazing experience.
IAWIKI Sydney Meet on Wednesday
Thank you to the 20 or so people who came to the IA meet in Sydney organised by Eric from IAWiki.
It was great to meet with fellow peers both new and old within IA, UX, visualisation, indexing, computer graphics and usability for the last meet in 2004. Here are some nice photos I stitched up from the night.
The ethics within Ubiquitous Computing
Adam Greenfield has written an informative and interesting article in Boxes and Arrows on some of the ethical guidelines for user experience within ubiquitous-computing. It is an very interesting read, which brings up several areas to consider including surveillance and some principles to observe.
Sign language study of children prompts linguistic question
Cognews comments on a Nature article of a recent study that tracked the development of a new sign language among children in Nicaragua. The researchers report of a spontaneous emergence of universal linguistic features among the children over several generations. It prompts the question: Is language Hardwired?
Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (Italy)
I was out last night with some friends for dinner at the IA Sydney meet and we spoke briefly about the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy and some of their projects.